Children on the Beach (ekphrastic poem, painting by Mary Cassatt, 1884)

There’s Liz and me, she’s the one in the hat,

I’m the one matrons call “adorable”—

my face bent to a pail— since I’m chubby like them.

A hundred years, we have become the sea

beyond our little bodies, black dresses, pinafores,

a frigate and two sailboats on our tides.

We are that line where sea touches the sky,

our motion in blue wind invisible.

Together we’ve withstood a century:

matrons, critics, Cassatt’s dreams we’d live on

to give her name some immortality.

Each viewer—you—will trade a soul with us.

We’re all beyond count now. One hundred years.

(originally appeared in World Without Finishing, Carnegie Mellon University Press 2018)

Baby Reaching for an Apple (ekphrastic poem, painting by Mary Cassat)

After you turn this page, the child will die.
Over a hundred years he’s died, risen,
each time to be this naked babe again,
the apple just escaping his small reach.


His mother, another of Cassatt’s “plain women,
grasps the apple branch: suspended moment
where she dies, too.

Apples suspended gold on branch by branch,
the background holds us. These are globed moments.
Read into them your possibilities.
The fruit shimmers. We hunger to touch, pluck.

(originally appeared in North American Review)

Peter Cooley was born and educated in the Midwest and has lived over half of his life in New Orleans, where he was Professor of English and Director of Creative writing at Tulane University and is now Professor Emeritus. The former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, he received the Marble Faun Award in Poetry and an Atlas Grant from the state of Louisiana. The father of three grown children, he published his tenth book World Without Finishing in 2018.